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She seam like a nice boat but are you in to sailing or motor sailing? She would be a capable curiser or around the world sailing boat but you could chose a dozen of other boats with the same pedigree that would do the same. Check out the Valiant 42 or the Tayana 37 or the Baba line, each boat will take you where you would want to go. Their is a west steel 72 down the dock from my 34 foot Beneteau that hasen't gone out this year. My family has been out for 32 days so far this year its been great.

08-08-2012 07:01 PM

SeaQuinn

Re: Looks good, how well will she sail?

really well said Jeff H !

08-08-2012 10:13 AM

Jeff_H

Re: Looks good, how well will she sail?

There are several internet sources for the kind of information that you are asking about.
Carl's SailCalculatorPro Sail Calculator Pro v3.53 - 2500+ boats has a long list of makes and models with all of the numbers crunched.

Yachtworld.com has a lot of information on various models on the market.

As a broad generality, if well maintained, older cruising boats do tend to hold their value. If used regularly, and maintained and upgraded over time, an older boat can be a good way to go. That said, at some point the components of the boat begin to simply wear out, and many of the older designs out there give up a lot in terms of ease of handling, and or seaworthiness.

But as I look at this discussion, I really want to emphasize that I would respectfully suggest that you are going at this in way that makes things wildly more difficult for yourself. I strongly suggest that you take to the time to build skills and learn about your options rather than come here as a newcomer looking for advise and an impossibly large boat for a first boat. This is not meant as a put down. We all had to start somewhere. But starting with very large boats only makes your dream much harder and riskier.

I apologize that I wrote the following for another purpose but it addresses what I am saying in more detail:

The dream of voyaging under sail can be a powerful one. There was a period when several times a month I would receive an email from someone who is considering doing just what you are proposing. I have watched literally dozens of folks go through this. Some are successful in getting 'out there', some discover that they really enjoy sailing and find that they really have no need to 'go out there’; some have discovered that the sailing life is just not for them, and others have not even gotten past the dreaming stage.

From what I have seen, the most successful (especially when children are involved) have been the ones who have been somewhat systematic about going. There is a lot to learn before one can safely venture offshore. No one would assume that if they knew nothing about how to fly an airplane, they could buy a jet airliner take a few lessons and be able to fly around the world. I think most rational people would expect to start with a small plane and work their way up. But for some reason people assume that they can just go out and buy a big boat, take a couple lessons, read a few books, and then go safely cruising.

While there are people who literally have taken a few lessons, read a few books and went out cruising, those that were successful following that route are far more rare than those who have done some kind of apprenticeship. Learning to sail and learning to cruise involves a lot of knowledge and no matter how much you know, there will always be more to learn, but I suggest that you at least take the time to learn the basics, and that just about can’t happen if you buy ‘a big sailboat’ and move your family aboard.

I find myself saying this a lot lately but here I go again. We all come to sailing with our own specific needs, our own specific goals and our own specific capabilities. The neat thing about sailing is that we all don’t have to agree that there is only one right way to go sailing. There is no more truth in expecting that there is one universally right answer about many aspects of sailing than there is in trying to prove that vanilla ice cream is universally better than strawberry ice cream. One area of sailing for which there is no one universally right answer involves the amount of knowledge one requires to go sailing.

For some, all they need or want to know about sailing is just enough knowledge to safely leave the slip sail where they want and get back safely. There is nothing inherently wrong with that approach. Lack of knowledge will impact the level of risk, cost, comfort, and performance, but if you want to get out there with minimal knowledge it can be done. But for others, like myself, there is much more to sailing than simply developing a rudimentary knowledge of sailing basics. If you fall into that camp, it is next to impossible to learn to sail really well on a boat as large as the one in question.

While I am in no way suggesting that this makes sense for everyone, for those who really want to learn to sail well, I strongly suggest that they start out owning a used 23 to 27 foot, responsive, light-weight, tiller steered, fin keel/spade rudder (ideally fractionally rigged) sloop (or if they are athletically inclined then a dinghy.) Boats like these provide the kind of feedback that is so necessary to teach a newcomer how to really sail well. Boats like these have small enough loads on lines and the helm that you and your crew can all participate and learn together. Being able to learn and participate, the crew will be more engaged and less likely to be bored and feel kidnapped.

By sailing well, I mean understanding the nuances of boat handling and sail trim in a way that cannot be learned on a larger boat. Used small boats generally hold their values quite well so that after a year or even few years or so of learning, you should be able to get most of your money out of the small boat and move on to a bigger boat actually knowing something about which specific desirable characteristics of a boat appeal to you as an experienced sailor rather than the preferences of some stranger on some Internet discussion group. Any costs associated with buying and reselling a small boat, will be minimal when compared to repairing a big boat that gets beat up will a novice is learning to sail on too big a boat, and are way smaller than the costs incurred when an inexperienced sailor buys the boat of their dreams only to realize with experience that the boat of their dreams turns out to be a nightmare.

From the advice that you have already gotten you can tell that there will not be a consensus of opinion on how to go distance cruising. It is nearly impossible to learn to sail well on a the types of boats you are considering and without highly developed sailing skills, a boat that large is pretty dangerous offshore.

In any event, I think that you have the right idea about taking sailing lessons. If I were in your shoes, I would sit down and put together a list of all of the things that I would want to know before I set off voyaging such as:
Boat handling
Sail trim
Rules of the road
Weather
Routing
Boat husbandry, repair and maintenance
Diesel/ gas engine maintenance and repair
First aid
Heavy weather tactics
Legal restrictions on leaving and entering foreign countries
Navigation, (Piloting, Celestial, dead reckoning and electronic)
Provisioning
Radio operators license exam requirements
Safe and dangerous fish to eat
Sail trim
Survival skills
Etc………..

Once I had what I thought was a complete list, I would set up a schedule to try to develop those areas of skill that I was currently lacking. As much as possible I would try to involve all those crewmembers involved in as many of those aspects as each is capable of understanding. This process could take as little as a year, but more often takes two to three years. The process itself can be very rewarding and can build the kind of bonds that are required to be cast away on that oh-so-small island that a boat underway represents.

Respectfully,
Jeff

08-07-2012 10:21 PM

Shamanic Bilgewater

Re: Looks good, how well will she sail?

I can't sea trial each boat I would like to, much less find comparable wind conditions from one trial to the next, so to narrow them down as far as upwind performance is concerned, is there any index that an extreme wannabe like myself can utilize for preparatory comparison shopping, an index which evaluates the theoretical, if not actual, upwind performance potentials of different boats? I would think that in this internet age, I could put into some database the identity of hull shape, and assume new sails and hardware upgrades as part of the baseline, and out would pop a happiness factor, along with best resale potential. Is that what all the I, J, P, E and the SA/D CWP MCR type abbreviation **** refers to, and do I have to learn all that ratio crap? Holy hell, I didn't finish high school algebra!
Wow, what a great idea for a website! Somebody who likes computers, get on that, make a performance comparison website for idiots and you'll be rich, and you can buy any boat that your website chooses.

And while I am on the subject, I want a performance cruiser with the best resale potential, because it seems the case that many of us get stuck not being able to resell the boat we fell in love with and bought, so a little resale sobriety check really out to be one of the top factors for making a purchase for the not super rich amoungst us.
Unfortunately, from what I can tell, some ordinary , but very pretty, boats that are wildly popular like Beneteaus, Catalinas and Jenneaus, well they don't look to me like classics that will hold their own over time.
Maybe some of them are, but there are just so darn many of them, the few special ones get lost in the blur.
If there are any real winners in that group, I mean stout ones, real ocean passage makers and not just floating living rooms, please someone let me know which ones fit more in the more serious category. They seem like they are made to look like giant living rooms to appeal to the wives, but they just go daysailing or maybe to Baja, and truck 'em back.
Are any of them as stout as they should be for ocean sailing? Maybe they resell better now as newish, but the Valiant that you mentioned and those similar older ones, the older ones with the teak below and the thicker fiberglass hulls, do any of them have good resale value still? Thanks for reading.

08-07-2012 04:52 PM

bobperry

Re: Looks good, how well will she sail?

Pretty hard to give you an accurate question tto so broad and general a question.
Consider:
Ketches are not all the same. Some sail very well and some don't.
Sloops are not all the same. Some sail very well and some don't.
Cutters are not all the same. Some sail very well and some don't.

But form the sake of staying with the stereotypes you are correct. The sloop will/can point higher than a cutter and a cutter will/can point higher than the ketch. But there are a lot of exceptions to this.

Figure a boat lie a Valiqant 4o will go to we4ather effectivekly with an apparebnt wind angle of 32 degrees if it is being sailed by a good sailor and the sails are in good shpe.

Then we can generalize to say a cutter flying two headais will point to an apparent wind angle of 36 degree and the ketch with mizzen up about the same, maybe 37 degrees depending on how you are trying to trim the mizzen. But there are some ketches out there that would struggle to point to 40 degrees apparent. In a breeze, with the mizzen boarded out or furled a good ketch should be able to point just as high as a sloop, all else being equal, i.e. hull shape, draft, displ, SA.

But I hate this approach. Boats are individuals and need to be evaluated specifically. There are too many variables to make the generalities applicable most of the time.

08-07-2012 02:01 PM

Shamanic Bilgewater

Re: Looks good, how well will she sail?

What is the closest close-hauled angle (ballpark figure) for most of the well performing types of performance cruisers? I am trying to evaluate performance cruisers that are sloop rigged vs cutters vs Ketches in the 40 to 46 ft range.
As I understand it, a Ketch does not point very high. A sloop points highest, and a cutter is in between. Can a well trimmed ketch point pretty high, or is it no comparison to a sloop? Sam

08-07-2012 12:58 PM

bobperry

Re: Looks good, how well will she sail?

Looks to me like that boat would have decent performance for a heavy, moderate draft cruising boat. Performance will be sedate but with good sails and some skill trimming them the boat should go to weather with an optimum apparent wind angle of around 37.23 degrees. That's not "close winded" but it will get you there and it's typical of boats of this type.

When you get advice from a friend try to get a handle on what the friend is using as a benchmark for "performance". If he is using a modern race boat or a sport boat then this LG design will be a pig. If he is using a Taswell or a Hylas then I think this boat would be in the same performance category.

06-22-2012 12:08 PM

TQA

Re: Looks good, how well will she sail?

Looks ali to me and that would fit with it being built at Huismans and fitted out at Moodies. Big comfortable liveaboard that would do just fine on a milk run circumnavigation IMHO.

BUT lots of 36 year old systems just waiting to break down and require replacement AND a tired looking teak deck. Needs someone with deep pockets.

Your post questioning this boat's sailing qualities doesn't give us the information we need to answer it properly. What are you buying it for? A liveaboard on Lake Union? Might be great. 'Round the world, short-handed, in the Trades - looks like that's what she was designed to do. Mid-week 'round the buoys racing in Puget Sound? Not so much. There are some red flags in the listing that suggest some expensive issues besides the teak decks. If the boat is aluminum, why are they having trouble with gelcoat blisters? Several of the photos refer to gelcoat repairs in the topsides and elsewhare. If the aluminum was fiberglassed over (Why 'glass over aluminum?? Was it leaking because of electrolysis??) and there are now blisters in various places, delamination is likely happening all over the boat where salt water has gotten in and where the fiberglass is keeping it snug up to the aluminum... This boat is a handful. Do you expect to have paid hands, or do you have four children who enjoy learning yacht maintenance?

I'm just reading thru this subject thread and posting as I go along.

I was wandering this same thing also? I thought I better go back and see whether this vessel was built of alum or glass??...confusing descriptions

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